Core Dump

Well not all grammar, just conjugating a verb. It says something about the sad state of the patent system when something like this even has a chance at getting patented.

LA Con, the 64th annual World Science Fiction Convention was held last weekend in Los Angeles. I couldn't go, unfortunately, (my last convention was Torcon 3 a couple of years ago), but at least there are pictures up on the web to browse. Here's a gallery from Wired and some from Flickr.

And just in case you think SF fans are weird, check out the pictures from Burning Man.

WorldCat lets you search 10,000 library catalogs around the world. You'll get a link to the libraries that has the book, cataloging information, and possibly a link to reviews (if there are any). The search functionality is pretty basic - no search by author, title, or subject - just a search field. Now, if only more libraries offered interlibrary loans.

Variable Star is an unfinished novel by Robert A. Heinlein that's been completed by Spider Robinson, based on Heinlein's notes and a detailed outline. It'll be published in September. You can now read excerpts from the book on the Variable Star web site.

I was at the Torcon 3 panel where the Heinlein society people announced they had the outline, and the audience pretty much nominated Robinson on the spot to write the book. I'm looking forward to it - it's going to be as close as Heinlein as we'll get until John Varley writes a sequel to Golden Globe.

Given that today is the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf coast, it's appropriate to post this link to an article called Hurricane Katrina: One Year Later, which looks at where the reovery effort is now.

You might be surprised how far you have to drive from New Orleans, LA to get to the Gulf of Mexico. Following the west bank of the Mississippi River along Hwy 23, you go through the separate and well-separated towns of Belle Chasse, Pointe a la Hache, Port Sulphur, Empire, Boothville, and finally over 60 miles from New Orleans the tiny oilfield supply and marina town of Venice.

At Empire the highway goes over a pretty tall bridge and on the other side of the canal, beyond the levee system, Katrina's storm surge came through with a vengeance. The roads have been cleared but everywhere along them are the twisted skeletons of steel buildings with vegetation hanging out of shattered second-story windows. A refrigerator sits atop the flooded husk of a house. A perfect square of fenceless pickets surrounds a perfectly bare concrete slab. The occasional forlorn FEMA trailer can be spotted parked on one of many slabs in a field of such slabs that was once a neighborhood. The carcass of a cow is wedged improbably in the canopy of a tree twenty feet up.

What is striking is not that the landscape looks like this; most of the coastline of Louisiana and Mississippi experienced such damage. What is striking is that it looked like this when I visited last week, in August 2006, almost an entire year after the storm came through.

It's a good article, though some pictures would have been nice.

I've commented on this before -- it used to be that photographs were regarded as truthful evidence - "a picture doesn't lie". That was never the case of course, as a skilled airbrush artist could alter photos with ease, if not undecteably. But it's certainly not the case now, as this gallery of doctored pictures proves. One of the photos is a classic Soviet example of the non-person, in this case Leon Trotsky.

This site was featured in a long article in the Sunday, August 27th Toronto Star, but I couldn't find it on the Star's web site. The full site name is Milestones in the History, Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Vistualization: An illustrated chronology of innovations. It's by Michael Friendly and Daniel J. Denis, two professors at York University.

The graphic portrayal of quantitative information has deep roots. These roots reach into histories of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization, which are intertwined with each other. They also connect with the rise of statistical thinking up through the 19th century, and developments in technology into the 20th century. From above ground, we can see the current fruit; we must look below to see its pedigree and germination. There certainly have been many new things in the world of visualization; but unless you know its history, everything might seem novel.

If you have any interest in the history of graphics or data visualization, this site is a must.

Wired has a good article about how manager Terry McBride and the band the Barenaked Ladies are making an end run around the major record labels. They're doing some cool things:

"This one's a real wingdinger," he says, leaning into the speakerphone so New York, Denver, and Los Angeles won't miss a word. "Let's give away the ProTools files on MySpace. Vocals, guitars, drums, and bass. We'll let the fans make their own mixes." The room falls quiet. Musicians usually record their instruments and vocals on separate tracks; the producer and mixer combine those tracks into a finished product. McBride wants to make the individual files available so that amateur DJs can use them like Lego bricks to create something all their own. The record industry likes control. McBride is proposing unfettered chaos.

If you want to see where the music world is going, read this article.

There is good news for Canadian science fiction fans this morning - Robert Charles Wilson has won the 2006 best novel Hugo award for his novel, Spin. This is a well-deserved award. Spin was easily the best of the Hugo contenders and in my opinion, the best science fiction novel of the this decade. Wilson has been writing excellent novels for almost 20 years now and he keeps getting better. I hope this award helps to get him the recognition that he deserves.

Here's the full list of awards. I like most of the choices this year, which is unusual.

JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD: John Scalzi
Fan Artist: Frank Wu
Fan Writer: Dave Langford
Fanzine: PLOKTA
Semiprozine: LOCUS
Professional Artist: Donato Giancola
Professional Editor: David G. Hartwell
Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: "Doctor Who," "The Empty Child"
and "The Doctor Dances"
Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: SERENITY
Best Related Book: Kate Wilhelm, STORYTELLER
Short Story: David D. Levine, "Tk'tk'tk"
Novelette: Peter S. Beagle, "Two Hearts"
Novella: Connie Willis, "Inside Job"
Novel: Robert Charles Wilson, SPIN
Special Award: Betty Ballantine, for lifetime achievement
Special Award: Harlan Ellison, for fifty years of publishing fiction

I decided on the spur of the moment to head down to Harbourfront this afternoon and see Great Lake Swimmers, a band I'd heard on the radio but never seen live. I'm glad I did. It's been a long time since I've been blown away like that by a band. Trust me on this one -- their albums don't do their live shows justice. On CD they come across something like early Cowboy Junkies - pleasant and rather ethereal. Live, it's more like a cross between Wilco and Crowded House, crunchy alt-country pop with absolutely gorgeous harmonies. I bought their second CD and I like it, although it doesn't have the punch of their live show. Definitely a band to go on my list of people I want to see again.

It's been almost a year since Hurricane Katrina demolished New Orleans and much of the Mississippi Gulf coast. Or, to take Spike Lee's position, since the US government and the Army Corps of Engineers demolished New Orleans. But you can't blame the Engineers for what happenned to the Gulf Coast. For a really detailed look at what happenned there, see Margie Kieper's blog on Wunderground.com. During this month, she's been taking a virtual journey along what some people are calling the "invisible coast" - the 200 mile stretch of coastlines devasted by Katrina's storm surge and winds.

After every hurricane, NOAA immediately takes aerial images of the destruction that occurred, and this begins starting the next day, and continues for as many days as required, as weather permits. NOAA took more images for hurricane Katrina than any other hurricane, by several magnitudes. And while media focused almost exclusively on New Orleans, LA (NOLA), note that in the scope of the damage documented by NOAA, NOLA is only a very small portion of the area affected by the storm. And the majority of the areas affected were, unlike NOLA, coastal areas that were inundated and destroyed by surge higher than any other hurricane in recorded history. In fact, this disaster was the largest disaster in terms of coastline affected, in the entire history of our country; an area of coastline equivalent to the distance from New York City to Washington, D.C. was completely destroyed, an area that included on the order of 100 communities and cities.

I haven't finished reading this yet - there's a lot there, but I will say that the scale of the damage is mind-boggling. It's scary to think what would happen if a storm like Katrina hit a more populated area -- say Miami, for example.

As for New Orleans, I watched Spike Les's moving documentary When the Levees Broke earlier this week. It's powerful polemic, which might have been more powerful if it had been less polemical. For some more detailed comments on the movie, see Brendan Loy's Irish Trojan blog. Loy gained some fame for being among the first to warn that Katrina was a threat to New Orleans, and was the first person interviewed in Lee's movie.

Whatever Spike’s motives, his failure to address crucial issues like the drowned buses or to adequately discuss the slowness of the evacuation — coupled with the unrebutted inflammatory comments by the likes of Harry Belafonte, and also Spike’s obsession with irrelevancies like Condi Rice’s shoe-buying habits — takes away a great deal of credibility from what could otherwise have been a truly excellent film. (And yes, I realize Acts III and IV haven’t aired yet, but given the stated topics of those acts, it seems highly unlikely they’ll cure the deficiencies of Acts I and II.)

Some bright folks have figured out how to emulate the Commodore 64 in Flash. The emalator even comes with a few public domain game ROMs. Hmmm -- I wonder if I can find a copy of Bug-a-Boo out there?

Employers who lock down the Internet or heavily block employee Internnet usage risk not being able to attract younger jobseekers, at least according to a Microsoft executive.

“Companies all over the world are saying, oh, you can’t be on the internet while you’re at work. You can’t be on instant messaging at work…” she said. “These are digital immigrant ideas.”

Kirah defines ‘digital immigrants’ as people who were not born into the digital lifestyle and view it as a distraction rather than an integral part of life. The younger generation of workers have been using computers and mobile phones since birth and she calls them ‘digital atives’.

It's an interesting issue and definitely one with two sides, as the Internet isn't exactly a safe place; not if you want to have a secure corporate network. Leaving things wide open is silly and dangerous, but blocking most access will likely hurt both morale and productivity. In my case, not only is it impossible to keep current in the technical writing field without Internet access -- I couldn't do my job without reasonably free access to web sites and support forums.

If you're interested in science fiction, then this interview with Lou Anders is a must read. Anders is an author and anthologist who is current ly editorial director of Prometheus Books' SF imprint, Pyr. He has some strong opinions about the state of the current SF publishing world.

Recent surveys show that fewer and fewer American students enroll in science, technology, math and engineering classes every year. In the last three decades, the US has dropped from number three to number seventeen in global rankings of countries with college students earning science and engineering degrees. In the past, this dearth of home-grown science/tech PhDs was made up for by immigration, and many of the immigrants stayed to become US citizens or work for US companies. But since 9/11, it's become increasingly hard for foreign students to come to the US, with the result that we are seeing the aforementioned sharp decline. As 25% of our current scientists and engineers are in their fifties and expect to retire by 2010, we are facing a very real crisis. No help from an Administration that restricts press access to climatologist and cast dispersions on the value of science either. (For that matter, how irresponsible is it for Bush to brag about the fact that he doesn't read? Jesus, what I'd give for a President to be seen holding a copy of an SF book).

This anti-science trend in both education and policy will have real and vital repercussions in the immediate future. It is no coincidence that science fiction is on the rise in both China and India, societies that are both moving in upward technological and economic trajectories. (And more power to them. If they get to Mars before we do, maybe it will

Quadralay are now demoing their XML and DITA adapter for WebWorks ePublisher. I had a brief look at it at the CMS 2006 conference in April. It lets you open DITA content in WebWorks ePublisher and use its formatting capabilities to generate multiple types of output and easily modify the formatting. If this doesn't appeal to you, you haven't tried to customize the PDF output from the DITA OpenToolkit.

The adapter isn't an off-the-shelf solution unfortunately -- it requires customization and appears aimed at enterprise customers (like Cisco), but it's pretty slick.

You can download or view the presentation, which was given to the Central Texas DITA User's Group last week. You'll probably need to install the Webex viewer first.

From the dita-users Yahoo group:

Thanks to some excellent work by the team of Anna van Raaphorst and Dick
Johnson, along with the comments, contributions, and permissions of many
others, the first public release of the DITA Open Toolkit User Guide (up
to
date for DITA OT 1.2.2) is now available at this address:
http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/SourceForgeFiles/doc/user_guide.html

I've been looking at the drafts of this as it was being developed and found it very useful. If you're working with DITA, this is essential. Getting the toolkit installed and working is moderately tricky, but the instructuctions in the guide make it much easier.

I've been a long-time fan of Jerry Pournelle's fiction and non-fiction, and read his Chaos Manor web site daily. He and his SF writing partner, Larry Niven, were awarded the Writers of the Future Lifetime Achievement Award this weekend. There's a good interview with him on msn.com in which he discusses his ideas for getting a workable space program.

He had two recommendations for real change:

* First, take a page from the X Prize playbook and offer private-sector prizes for outer-space innovation. But don't be skimpy with the purse. Recently, billionaire Robert Bigelow said that there weren't any serious contenders for his $50 million orbital space prize - and when I mentioned that to Pournelle, he said the problem was that the prize was too paltry. He recommended offering $5 billion to the first U.S. company that puts the same spaceship into orbit 24 times in the course of a year, and $10 billion tax-free to the first company that keeps a 31-person colony on the moon for three years and a day. "How long do you think it would take?" he asked rhetorically. "I'd give it five years."
* Second, take a page from the X-plane program playbook from the 1950s and 1960s - experimental craft like the X-1, the X-3 and the X-15 (but not the X-33, which Pournelle called a "boondoggle"). If they're done right, experimental spacecraft can quickly translate on-paper technologies into true space vehicles, he said. "X programs do not invent new technologies," he said. "They build the best thing you can build with the technology that you have as of Aug. 31, 2006."

Construction on the International Space Station will resume next week, when Atlantis lifts off carrying a bus-sized portion of the stations truss and new solar power arrays.

Since the project began in late 1998 with the joining of two American and Russian modules, the United States and 15 other nations have slowly put together a structure that weighs more than 400,000 pounds, with a habitable volume of almost 15,000 cubic feet. When completed, it is to weigh almost a million pounds and have a cabin volume of more than 33,000 cubic feet, larger than a typical five-bedroom house.

Getting to that goal will require some of the most difficult shuttle missions ever mounted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, starting with the Atlantis’s launching from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The shuttle and its crew of six will haul a 30,000-pound, 45-foot truss segment to the station, delicately remove it from the cargo bay and install it during three spacewalks by two teams of astronauts.

The Shuttle's commander for this mission is Navy Capt. Brent W. Jett Jr. -- I'd have a hard time thinking of a better name for a Space Shuttle commander.

In 1895, in a bar in St. Louis, "Stag" Lee Shelton shot Billy Lyons in a dispute over a hat. Somehow, the event was immortalized in song over the years, most famously in Llod Price's hit, Stagger Lee. Now, author Derek McCulloch and artist Shepherd Hendrix have taken another look at the murder, this time in the form of a complex and fascinating graphic novel. McCulloch and Hendrix use the various versions of the song Stagger Lee as jumping off points to examine different aspects of the story. They give us a multifaceted view of life in St. Louis, looking at the murder and trial and the lives of the people it affects, black and white, rich and poor.

Anyone who's put off by the fact that this is a graphic novel should re-examine their prejudices. This is a complex and multidemensional story. McCulloch's taut writing and Hendrix's dynamic art combine into a rich historical tapestry. The book has been published to good reviews and it deserves them. I'd love to see it picked up and done as a historical miniseries - how about it, Spike Lee?

You can find a long interview with McCulloch and Hendrix here. The interview links to a zip file of ten different versions of the song Stagger Lee, some of which McCulloch used as inspiration for the book.

I should note that I've known Derek since the early 1980s. I've always thought that he was a good writer -- this book proves it.

With all the attention being given to air travel these days, people tend to forget that there are alternatives. Kuro5hin has a long post about travelling from Quebec City to New York city via train. It looks like the Quebec to Montreal part of the trip is the best - travel by Amtract leaves something to be desired.

It's 6 PM and the dining car has run out of food. I would have had a cup of coffee for dinner but they've run out of plastic lids as well. Perhaps Amtrak was surprised at the level of occupancy. It's a long ride though and due to the signal light problems, it's running an hour and a half late. They've been running it hard for the last few hours and maybe they've made up some time but when these old trains try to make up time, they shake hard enough to make reading difficult. The dining car is due to reopen once we leave Albany so maybe another Sante Fe chicken sandwich is in my future. The guy sitting ahead of us called a friend a few stops ago and got the number of a Dominos near the station in Albany. He had to run around the station a bit but he made his connection. The smell of fresh, hot pizza when you're hungry is it's own unique kind of pain.

After watching Pulse, Pink Floyd's latest concert DVD, I seriously regret not going to see them when they came to Toronto. My officemate at the time went, and figured it was the best concert he'd ever seen, and I can understand why. The stage setup that Pink Floyd was using at the time has to be seen to be believed.

Musically, it's 1990s Floyd - not as eerie or intense as the 1970 version I saw in concert - but making up for it in sheer, glorious excess. The 5.1 sound mix recreates the quad sound system that Floyd used and the sound is clean and detailed, although the drums could use a bit more punch. The video isn't quite up to current standards - the concert was shot in video, not on film, unfortunately.

Pulse is definitely one of the best concert DVDs that I've seen. The rating on IMDB is 9.5 out of 10, and I won't argue with that.

Here's an interesting post in which a chemist looks at what terrorists would have to do to create a binary liquid explosive on an airplane.

Anyway, from all of this, I conclude that either


1) The terrorists had a brilliant idea for how to combine oxidizer and
a ketone or ether to make some sort of nasty organic peroxide
explosive in situ that has escaped me so far. Perhaps that's true
-- I'm not omniscient and I have to confess that I've never tried
making the stuff at all, let alone in an airplane bathroom.
2) The terrorists were smuggling on board pre-made organic peroxide
explosives. Clearly, this is not a new threat at all -- organic
peroxide explosives have been used by terrorists for decades
now. Smuggling them in a bottle is not an interesting new threat
either -- clearly if you can smuggle cocaine in a bottle you can
smuggle acetone peroxide. I would hope we had means of looking for
that already, though, see below for a comment on that.
3) The terrorists were phenomenally ill informed, or hadn't actually
tried any of this out yet -- perhaps what we are told was a
"sophisticated plot" was a bunch of not very sophisticated people
who had not gotten very far in testing their ideas out, or perhaps
they were really really dumb and hadn't tried even a small scale
experiment before going forward.

Of course, there are other techniques for blowing up planes:

Then, lets consider books and magazines. Sure, they look innocent, but
are they? For 150 years, chemists have known that if you take
something with high cellulose content -- cotton, or paper, or lots of
other things -- and you nitrate it (usually with a mixture of nitric
and sulfuric acids), you get nitrocellulose, which looks vaguely like
the original material you nitrated but which goes BOOM
nicely. Nitrocellulose is the base of lots of explosives and
propellants, including, I believe, modern "smokeless" gunpowder. It
is dangerous stuff to work with, but you're a terrorist, so why
not. Make a bunch of nitrocellulose paper, print books on it, and take
'em on board. The irony of taking out an airplane with a Tom Clancy
novel should make the effort worthwhile.

Update: It seems that the above noted post isn't very accurate -- it is possible to make stable acetone peroxide explosives without blowing yourself up in the process. See the letter from John Carmack in the Wednesday section of Jerry Pournelle's View from Chaos Manor.

InfoWorld has published an article listing the greatest software ever written. Certainly any such list is going to be pretty subjective, but they make a good case, especially for software like the IBM 360 operating system, UNIX, and the Apollo guidance software that got the Apollo astronauts to the moon and back in 8K of memory.

I've always been amazed at the Apollo spacecraft guidance system, built by the MIT Instrumentation Lab. In 1969, this software got Apollo 11 to the moon, detached the lunar module, landed it on the moon's surface, and brought three astronauts home. It had to function on the tiny amount of memory available in the onboard Raytheon computer--it carried 8 Kbytes, not enough for a printer driver these days. And there wouldn't be time to reboot in case of system failure when the craft made re-entry. It's just as well Windows wasn't available for the job.

The Apollo guidance system probably seems like routine software to technology sophisticates. Far more complex navigational systems are in operation today. The system's essentials were a few well-known algorithms based on proven logic. But to me, it's still rocket science. Great software dazzles us by virtue of what it does correctly in the face of everything that could go wrong.

XMetal and Mekon have announced the availability of their FrameMaker Adapter for the DITA OpenToolkit. The adapter lets users author DITA documents in XMetal (or other DITA-compatible editors) and then use FrameMaker to publish high-quality print documents. I saw a demo of this adapter earlier in the year and it looks like a viable solution if you don't want to author documents in FrameMaker.

So now there are (or there will be soon) two different workflows for authoring in DITA using FrameMaker. One, as above, is to author in pure XML and then use the Mekon adapter to get the XML into FrameMaker so you can output for print or PDF. The other is to author in structured FrameMaker using the recently announced FrameMaker DITA Application Pack, and use the DITA OpenToolkit and its associated plugins to output different formats.

At this point, I'm leaning to the second approach, but that will depend on how well Adobe's DITA plugin works. I'm eagerly looking forward to the release of the beta sometime this month.

NASA's plans to replace the Shuttle with a shuttle-derived system are in trouble. One of the key components, a solid-fueled booster dubbed "The Stick" seems to be unworkable. Space Daily has an article summarizing the problems.

This new SRB-5B is totally different from the current SRB-4 or even the old SRB-5A that was partly developed for the now-cancelled Shuttle upgrade program. Shuttle SRBs carry their loads divided between two side attachments instead of concentrated on the top dome. They also don't have to steer themselves through wind shears with a huge low-density hydrogen tank on top acting as a sail.

The current Ares I has essentially no commonality with the Space Shuttle and will therefore take longer than The Original Stick to be developed and thoroughly tested. Current plans call for launching the first manned Ares-Orion test mission in late 2014. Regular missions to the ISS probably won't start until 2015 - and with normal schedule slippage, not until after US participation in ISS is supposed to end in 2016.

An article published on the US government informatoin web site, usinfo.state.gov, says that science fiction is good stuff; it "ignites public interest in science, offers avante-garde ideas".

The reason for science fiction's important relationship with science, said Margaret A. Weitekamp, a curator with the U.S. National Air and Space Museum's division of space history, is that good science fiction authors look at the current scientific research and ask the "What if?" question. These are some of the same questions that researchers, and often the public, are asking, she said in an August 9 interview with the Washington File.

Science fiction authors can make these issues dramatic and seemingly more relevant to readers, Weitekamp said.

What the article doesn't mention is that science fiction is also a major venue for political criticism. During the McCarthy era in the 1950s, the science fiction magazines were publishing some of the most intense and effective political criticism being published anywhere.

Space.com has an interview with Burt Rutan in which he discusses his plans for SpaceShipTwo, the followup to the X-Prize winning SpaceShipOne.

The bad news, Rutan advised, is related to the government space programs. “I hate to say that, but the reason is that they are just structured so there will be a lot of money spent and they are not likely to reap the benefits that are going to help us.”

The good news, Rutan suggested as a guess, is that there will be breakthroughs forthcoming, stemming from what happens after the first generation of suborbital craft—including competitors, now known and unknown—take to the sky.

“We need what amounts to natural selection to work. Nobody is smart enough to know ahead of time whether something is the right answer. You’ve got to field the good ones and bad ones for the good ones to float to the top,” Rutan said.

Here's a review of Freespire, a new Linux distribution based on Linspire. This is intended as a desktop replacement for Windows and includes a lot of multimedia functionality not built in to (though available for) many other Linux distributions.

There's a significant anniversary to celebrate tomorrow in the computer world - on August 12, 1981, IBM announced the IBM Model 5150 personal computer. Although it wasn't the first PC, the IBM name and it's relatively open architecture helped to bring the PC into the corporate world.

My first PC was a 128 KB (yes, KB) IBM PC with two 360 KB, 5.25" floppy drives and a monochrome graphics-capable monitor. With software (DOS 1.1, WordStar 3.3, and PC File, it cost over $6,000. It would be hard to spend that much on a PC today, unless you wanted a screaming hot gaming machine/graphics workstation with more than a terabyte of storage.

The excellent CBC radio show, The Contrarians, has done a program on copyright, DRM, and related issues. I listened to this while driving out of the Soo the other day and it's definitely worth a listen. BoingBoing has provided a link to a copy of the show.

Yes, commas do matter. And they mattered big time to Rogers, who lost a 2 million dollar contract because of a misplaced comma. The placement of a comma in a cancellation clause allowed the other company to cancel the contract after one year instead of five.

Language buffs take note — Page 7 of the contract states: The agreement “shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.”

This is the type of ambiguity that technical writers are trained to notice. It's not usual for a technical writer to review contracts (though it does happen, and I've had to do it myself), but a good lawyer should have caught it too.

Being a veteran of both CP/M and DOS, I often find myself switching to the Windows command line for simple tasks like deleting or copying files. But you can do quite a bit more with it. There's some good tips on using the command line with network commands on Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor Reviews site.

Incidentally, if you haven't looked at Chaos Manor Reviews, it's worth a visit. It's the home of Jerry Pournelle's columns that ran in Byte magazine for many years. The content is currently free, but eventually it'll require a subscription. But it's worth it.